“Look at me,” President Biden likes to say when asked (as he's often asked these days) if he's too old to serve a second term. His wish is coming true.
For the first three years of his administration, Mr. Biden has been barely visible, in contrast to his predecessor’s sprawling omnipresence. His brief appearances now elicit thousands of remote diagnoses from armchair gerontologists. Major speeches like his State of the Union address in March are judged not on policy but on the fluency of his spoken word performance. Small gaffes, like getting one sentence wrong at his Philadelphia rally in April, are analyzed as a sign of decline.
He faces the image problems that time imposes on all of us. The first presidential debate of 2024 is now being held months earlier than usual, in part because Biden's campaign wants to overcome growing concerns about whether the 81-year-old president can handle four more years in office. “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a genocide,” Philip Roth's Everyman cried in 2006. In this year's election, it may be both.
The president is certainly quite old, the oldest person to ever hold the presidency. When he was first elected to the Senate in 1972, the current leaders of the UK, France and Italy had not yet been born. If Biden serves a full second term, he will retire to Delaware at age 86. After three and a half years in a job where everyone else retires, Biden already looks like a different person from the Covid-19 campaign, his hair is thinning and his gait is strained. His age may be just a number. But the perception of his age is deeply entangled with cultural connotations of aging that have been formed over the centuries and passed down to us through religion, literature and art.
His predecessor and rival, Biden, is also older and less articulate. But the same polls that show Biden trailing Donald J. Trump, 78, convicted of 34 felonies, also show that of the two, only one has such widespread misgivings about the path of all flesh. Polls have repeatedly shown that policies are not the main obstacle to a sitting president's reelection. Younger Democrats to Biden's left and right are outpacing him in lower-level polls.
Greek playwrights, who were adept at portraying democracy, liked to portray old people in images of desiccation and decay. Kings “wither,” soldiers “wither.” Tragedies often feature choruses of the elderly (Aeschylus's “Agamemnon,” Sophocles' “Oedipus Rex”) who sing of themselves as shadows, dreams, semi-insubstances. When Biden's limbs seem stiff, as they did when he stepped out of a car in Paris this month, or his eyes seem to wander, as they did at a Juneteenth party on the South Lawn, the president is wrapped up in these metaphors about the fragility of aging. The perception of mortality, that he has become thin and frail, may be more dangerous than the actual disability. Travel to wartime Kiev and it will still haunt you.
On the other hand, insofar as a leader embodies or symbolizes the nation, his (or sometimes her) old age can also signify solidity, tradition, and faith. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of West Germany, held the top job until he was 87. His election posters exaggerated his cheeks and wrinkles to portray the restoration of stability after the nightmare of 1933-45. Germans have described the cunning power broker as ” The Artelderly, and Biden pulled off a similar combination of elderly and civic recovery during the 2020 campaign (he was also elderly at the time).
Whether he's shouting down onlookers during a parliamentary speech or chatting in his Aviator with officials half his age, he embodies the epitome of a leader. SenexLike Homer's Nestor, Titian's Farnese Pope, Alec Guinness' Jedi. Wise, perhaps cunning. Long-winded, perhaps, but full of life. But one day you may be seen as the father of a country, and the next as a decrepit old man. In politics you seek impartiality in vain.
The problem isn't capacity, image The two men are at the limit of their abilities, and under those conditions we can expect a fierce contest. “When old men fall, young men rise,” plots the traitor Edmund in King Lear. But it must be reiterated that there is no generational conflict in this week's debate. Trump has dyed his hair, Biden seems to have left it gray, but he too exhibits a physical stiffness and a lack of verbal concentration that, other things being equal, should not inspire envy in his rival who is only three and a half years older. (A few days ago, when Trump boasted that he had “done well” on a cognitive test, he got the name of his doctor, who is now a member of Congress, wrong.)
On our phones, the feeds are constantly updating, but the content remains the same. In a two-party system biased toward incumbents, this year's presidential reelection is just the top layer of a larger clash between old institutions and new media. Outgoing Sen. Mitch McConnell, 82, the House Minority Leader, froze on the spot twice during recent press conferences.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died in office last year at age 90, seemed unsure where she was when the vote was called.
In this gerontocratic malaise, our political discourse has also been weakened, diluted into a pathetic fusillade of real or contrived geriatric moments. Quite a bit now through selectively edited video clips captioned for a select digital audience, each reaffirming that your least favorite leader is as crazy or infirm as George III. When Biden appeared to stare into space at a G7 meeting this month, at least in the 30-second snippet circulated by the Republican campaign team and many media outlets afterwards, he was actually congratulating a paratrooper who had landed nearby. But linear news reporting, out-of-context broadcasting, is a relic of Biden’s century. Out-of-context clips are the cheapest, most lethal form of election advertising, and no deepfake software is needed.
There is nothing wrong with expecting vitality from our leaders, but do we only judge our politicians’ capabilities when we are concerned with their shortcomings and missteps? Or are we punishing our aging state for hinting at the fate that awaits us all? In Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 samurai-aging epic, Ran, a King Lear-like warlord believes he can tame the kingdom one last time, only to discover too late that politics are moving faster than he can keep up. Succession plans go awry and an epic battle ensues. The warlord wanders through the tall grass, his gray hair flying, and realizes he is now just an old man. “I’m lost,” says the old ruler. “Such is the human condition,” says his jester.
Video production was by Ang Lee and Caroline Kim.